1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to license management programs suitable for licensing and managing the usage of digital content, such as computer software products.
2. Description of the Art
Although computer programs, individually also referred to as computer software products, can be sold to an end user, a more frequent approach is to license the software product or program to an end user, with the software vendor or owner retaining ownership of all of the rights to the computer product.
Each license is devised to control the usage of the computer product or software by stating the conditions under which the computer product may be used, such as the location of use, the number of times used, etc. Software products are licensed in many ways. By one category, licenses can be divided into node-locked licenses or network licenses. By another category, licenses can be divided into product licenses or product suite licenses. In general most licenses could be described by a combination or a simple variation thereof of the above two categories; i.e. node-locked product licenses, node-locked product suite licenses, network product licenses, and network product suite license.
Node-locked licenses restrict the use of software to a given computer. The major limitation of this approach is that it requires customers to purchase software separately for each potential user. Since each user does not use each software on his machine all the time, software purchased via this approach would idle most of the time. This is a very inefficient use of customers' money.
Network licenses allow access to the software products on computer networks formed of a number of interconnected computers or nodes which may be linked to each other and/or a central host. This addresses the primary inefficiency of node-locked licenses. The customer must now purchase licenses only to cover the anticipated number of peak simultaneous users of that software.
Product licensing restricts the use of the license to only the product for which it is valid. In other words, the license is not transferable to other products. The limitation of this approach is that a customer must purchase the peak licenses, either node-locked or network, for each product separately. Again, peak usage for different products do not occur at the same time. Hence, the customer ends up purchasing more software licenses than really required.
Product suite licenses allow access to several software products using common licenses. A suite would generally include several individual programs which may be run concurrently with each other or individually and may or may not be linked to other programs in the suite. Traditional licensing approaches for computer programs or suites typically involve one license for all of the programs in each entire suite such that a user on a node of a computer network is charged with one license use regardless of which program the user is running from a particular program suite. A major limitation of this approach is that it assumes that each product in the suite has an equal value. Also, product suites typically involve a small number of software products which complement each other, and the expansion of suite licensing to license a wide range of software products is commercially impractical.
A recent development in licensing has been the units based licensing of multiple products. In such a system, different products are assigned different values in terms of units. A customer would license a certain number of units to run any and all of these products. While on paper, this system appears to address limitations listed above, in reality it does not due to the manner in which it is implemented by several organizations. Under this setup, when a user runs multiple products, the user is charged multiple units, also called stacking of units. Since the customers have limited budgets for purchasing software products, this system (i) forces the users to terminate one product in order to run another, thus decreasing the user's efficiency, or (ii) forces the customer to purchase additional licenses with no additional value thus undermining the profitability of their organization. This system does not encourage users to try new products, even though they are accessible and available on their network.
Although existing software or electronic media licensing systems allow or deny access to a requesting user to execute or run an electronic media or software program on a computer or computer network, frequently the computer or computer network does not have sufficient capacity to immediately run the program, software or electronic media. Normally, a small capacity processor would be completely adequate in instances where there are a small number of users requesting access to the processor or such access is requested infrequently. However, it may become necessary to expand the memory or disk space, or to increase the processor speed, to name a few factors, when more users are added to the network, where the computer products or applications are run more frequently, where the size of an application goes up, etc. For example, a few years ago, a full vehicle model consisted of approximately 100,000 discrete points. Currently, vehicle models contain 500,000 discrete points and are heading towards 1,000,000 discrete points thereby increasing by an order of magnitude the application size.
Cost factors may dictate that a particular computer or computer network owner would not always wish to immediately expand the capacity or speed of its computer or computer network. This is particularly the case where there may be short lived bursts in application execution or user access which are not expected to occur in the future. Another factor is that the dynamic consumer electronic medium industry in which current technology is updated or obsolete in a matter of months. A particular consumer would prefer not to install and un-install software products on his/her computer on a recurring basis. Rather, the consumer would prefer to just use the software. Further, new versions of software products or digital media come out very frequently. Bug fixes and patches are delivered almost on a continual basis. A consumer or digital content user does not always receive or install fixes or patches. Further, a business consumer may not wish to maintain a computer server and employ information technology people to manage it. A business consumer may also wish to provide a customer with the choice of products for a set budget. A business consumer may further wish to provide a customer with the flexibility to transfer licenses from one product to another. While application service providers' processors have been used at a remote location to temporarily run an application program which cannot be run on an existing computer or computer network due to over capacity, etc., licensing approaches have not extended to cover such remote application service provider execution.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a licensing management method for licensing digital content which overcomes the limitations of previous licensing approaches. It would also be desirable to provide a licensing management method which provides a user with the choice of executing or running digital content on its own computer and/or on a remote application service provider processor.